In a language darkly…

Meena Kandasamy writes angrily, often eloquently, about the politics of the body and caste in contemporty Indian society. Subash Jeyan

(Published in The Hindu Literay Review on March 5, 2011.)

A man who saw the poet Meena Kandasamy read out from her latest poetry collection, Ms. Militancy, at the Jaipur Literary Festival this January apparently felt threatened enough to post his reactions on his Facebook wall: “Watched a so called poetry reading session of a so called dalit-feminist-poet from chennai! The so called poem and the so called reading postures quite resembled that of w***** invitation to clients on roadsides! She addressed herself as a dalit-feminist! All the way i wondered, what did dalitism and feminism had to do in that poem, which literally worshiped group sex practice!!” Perhaps it is unfair to give such reactionary words more circulation than they deserve but they do give us an entry point to the kind of poems that Meena Kandasamy writes (definitely not pornography) and a counterpoint from ‘real’ life to our notions of ourselves as a ‘progressive’ society. I don’t know what that Facebook person’s idea of poetry really is but if yours is anywhere remotely in alignment with his, perhaps you shouldn’t be reading this collection. Or, come to think of it, perhaps you need to read it more than anyone else…

No easy passage

It won’t be an easy passage if your politics are mainstream, let alone conservative. As a woman dalit poet, Meena Kandasamy writes angrily, often eloquently, about the politics of the body and caste in contemporary Indian society. Necessarily, what she sees is different from the images we have constructed for ourselves. It was Ambedkar who said that “women are the gateways of the caste system”. Kandasamy is intensely aware of how the female body is used as an instrument of control, by naming it, fixing it and locating it within a discourse whose concerns are very different. Talking about the female self and body in ways not ‘allowed’ by this discourse becomes a way of reclaiming it, of declaring one’s independence from this discourse:

Tongues untied, we swallow suns.

Sure as sluts, we strip random men.

Sleepless. There’s stardust on our lids.

Naked. There’s self-love on our minds.

And yes, my dears, we are all friends.

There will be no blood on our bridal beds.

We are not the ones you will choose for wives.

We are not the ones you can sentence for life.

(“Backstreet girls”)

And it goes hand it hand with an irreverent taking apart of the contradictions, hypocrisies and pretences she finds around her everywhere in life, literature and the mythologies of the mainstream. But it’s not all mockery, for, she can also write with chilling clarity about the way things still are. Sample this:

One-eyed

the pot sees just another noisy child

the glass sees an eager and clumsy hand

the water sees a parched throat slaking thirst

but the teacher sees a girl breaking the rule

the doctor sees a medical emergency

the school sees a potential embarrassment

the press sees a headline and a photofeature

dhanam sees a world torn in half.

her left eye, lid open but light slapped away,

the price for a taste of that touchable water.

In other poems, she writes with a gay abandon that comes from the liberating knowledge that she doesn’t have to play by your rules anymore. Her poems mock the countless edifices of tradition, culture and literature that had been/are complicit in keeping a whole people invisible and worse for centuries. In spite of the delight in wordplay, the startling phrases that catch you unawares and ambush you as you turn a corner (there’s that delightful emperuman, Emperor-man), her poems are mostly simple, direct, effective and often violent. Because it takes violence to rip apart structures that have kept you down, structures that have become invisible, transparent and part of the ‘natural’ order of things to those who don’t have to live with its stifling oppressiveness. Actually, Meena Kandasamy does a favour to people like that gentleman on Facebook by enabling them to see again. For, acceptance could be the first step towards change, for oneself and others.

Possible redemptions

For herself, it is through rebellion that the path to freedom lies, to other more enabling possibilities. As she puts it poignantly in the ‘ foreword’: “I have to write poetry to be heard, I have to turn insane to stay alive….Telling my story another way lets me forgive you. Twisting your story to the scariest extent allows me the liberty of trying to trust you. I work to not only get back at you, I actually fight to get back to myself.” The possibility of redemption, then, through the rubble of rebellion, both for her and us. But if her poetry only shocks or offends us, if we can only mourn the past that has been shown up for what it is, the possibility of reconfiguring our world and living spaces and discourses on a more equal and just footing would be lost, yet again…

Ms. Militancy, Meena Kandasamy, Navayana, 2010, p.60, Rs. 150.

Articulations of anger

Dalit poet Meena Kandasamy on the importance of authenticity and being true to one’s own background, cultural roots and experiences. Subash Jeyan

Published in The Hindu Literary Review on January 6, 2008

Just 24, Meena Kandasamy is one of the better known Dalit poets writing in English today and speaks with an understanding much beyond her years. She says she gave up formal education after school because, identity being what it is, “I thought education was going to cripple me and I didn’t want to be crippled even if I wasn’t going anywhere.” (She is, however, pursuing a Ph.D. in ELT now.)

A turning point in her career was when, just after school, she wrote an essay on Naipaul, who, she feels, got the Nobel Prize post 9/11 mainly for his anti-Islamic stances.

One of the participants at the Prakriti Poetry Festival, her first volume of poetry, Touch, was published in 2006 to critical acclaim. Excerpts from a conversation…

Why poetry, given that your type of writing is extremely polemical?

One reason is that I am not an angry young man who can go out and do things on the ground even though I may feel strongly about certain things. One realises one is actually incapable of doing anything, even if it’s something very domestic. You really can’t challenge your hate or anger. The only thing you can do about it is write. If there is something I can go out there and do, I’d have done it.

Secondly, women make better writers than politicans because they don’t have to compromise at any point of time. As a writer, I can have a zero-tolerance policy for any kind of oppression. It gives you the freedom to be a one-woman army. Moreover, in Tamil literature, we have this strong tradition of writers who very powerfully articulate what is happening in the society. Bharathi, for example, wrote that if one man goes without food, we’ll destroy the whole world. Perhaps he’ll be called a terrorist today.

I am also concerned by the kind of voices I hear in English writing. I write in English and never used to think that English is a privileged language but you go out into the world and look at what is getting written in English in India and yes, you do feel it is a privileged language. That is one of the reasons I am doing a lot of translations too.

Even love in your poems seems to have so much ambiguity in that love seems to be as much about aggression as it is about affection….

Yeah, the man-woman relationship is not something that is easily negotiated. It is something that has a lot of hierarchy built in. I even wanted to call my collection, “Touch Me, Touch Me Not”. As a Dalit, as a woman, you want to be loved, you want to be accepted, you want to be a part of things, you want to be touched that way, you know, the whole untouchability question. On the other hand as a woman, you also need your space, you want to delimit. One reason why I talk so much about caste is that it is a major problem for women because in human relationships it puts up a system of hierarchy, of everyday violence, the same things that are built into relationships with women. For a man, the woman is the Dalit in the house.

If caste is the division of labour, as Ambedkar says, then look at what is happening to women, they are certainly another caste. In the language that society uses (singular form of address) and in the violences unleashed, Dalits and women are the same. One has to show the extent to which women have been dalit-ised, that caste and patriarchy go hand in hand.

Awareness of your identity, of being a Dalit, of coming from this particular time and place, plays a major role in your poetry, doesn’t it?

See, we all become aware of our identities only when we get hurt, OK? I had a very “Tamil-sounding” name , I was a Dalit and while studying, over a period of time, I became an object of jokes because of all that; it was isolating, it was hurting. People hurt you because you are a woman, because you are a Dalit. And it is only when you personally get hurt that you start looking at what is happening to others. But, you’ll have to accept who you are and only if you are writing from what is your background, you’ll make sense. So it is very important that one writes as a woman, as a Dalit. Your personal history is something which never goes away from you and if you are honest, you have to write about it. And it is important to be honest.

Some activists/academics like Kancha Ilaiah say, bury all your Indian languages [in favour of English]. But somehow I am very scared of that. You see, Tamil has quite a long history of resistance to foreign languages, of resistance to Sanskritisation. Yes, Dalits need English for social empowerment but English has become more or less another caste. In India, after caste and class, the next important thing is whether you are English-speaking and unlike caste it is something you can change by yourself. I think you have to be very conscious of your background, of where your roots lie.